If God is love, you asked, why are we supposed to fear him?
Turn to page 193 in your hymnal, Reverend Barrett said. “How Great Thou Art.”
So if you remember all that, he told himself, what makes you think now that you can ever find your family again? If there is no God, there is no heaven. If there is no heaven, your family is gone.
And with that realization, the pain in his stomach exploded like a gasoline fire, it dropped him to his knees, to the leaf-matted earth. The fire was black and it devoured the sunlight; it sucked all the oxygen from the woods. It laid him down flat with his face to the wet leaves where there was nothing but the chill and the damp stink of rot.
Fourteen
DeMarco was still in his office at six that evening, still trying to piece together the disparate shards of Thomas Huston’s life. He thought of all the times he had seen the Hustons together at public events—the summer carnival, the Pumpkin Parade, a spaghetti dinner fund-raiser for a local girl with leukemia. In every case, they had appeared the epitome of a happy family, smiles on all their faces, Claire and Thomas holding hands, the kids laughing, little Davy all eyes and sloppy grin. They could have been poster models for the traditional family unit.
He knew how easy it is to mask the darker emotions from most people, to hide sorrow, anger, a glowering hostility in the shadows of the heart. Most people have no desire to peer into those shadows. Who needs the extra weight of other people’s burdens? But some people, the unlucky few, are wired to see the shadows first. DeMarco considered it a kind of handicap, like color blindness or extreme myopia. And on those occasions when he had seen Thomas Huston in public, DeMarco had sensed that the man’s happiness was genuine, the joy he took from his family. But there had been shadows too. They lurked in the corners of Huston’s eyes. They pulled at the corner of his mouth when he smiled.
And Huston noticed the same in me, DeMarco told himself. That sadness in your eyes, he'd written.
Because Huston had his demons too. He had been very good at keeping them caged, of channeling them into his fictions, at least until this past weekend. Then, for some reason, the beasts had escaped. But where had they taken him after the slaughter? And where would they lead him next?
A knock on the doorframe interrupted his thoughts. DeMarco looked up from the lined white pad on which he had been scribbling notes. Trooper Carmichael stood in the doorway, a plastic jewel case in hand.
“The Outlook Express files,” Carmichael said. He strode forward and laid the case atop DeMarco’s notepad. A small man with a tight mop of curly, black hair, Carmichael had a wide-eyed, nervous look that always reminded DeMarco of a Chihuahua his mother had had when he was a boy. The dog’s name was Tippy, a frenetic, little creature full of useless energy. It had had a passion for digging holes in the yard, then running from one to the next like a frenzied treasure hunter, shoving its muzzle in deep. Carmichael was like that with computers. He was happiest with his nose close to a keyboard, his fingers scrabbling to claw treasure from computer code.
“I’m still working on the deleted files and a few password-protected documents. Should have those for you by tomorrow afternoon.”
DeMarco eyed the jewel case with the shiny disk inside. “Anything interesting?”
“I don’t read them, Sergeant. I just pull ’em.”
“Thanks,” DeMarco said. “Now take a break, okay? I don’t want you working through the night again.”
Carmichael grinned. “I’ve got plans for tonight.”
“They involve a woman, I hope.”
The trooper blushed. “My buddy and I are writing a program that sends spiders out through the entire Internet.”
“Spiders?”
“Little pieces of program. They scour the Internet and grab whatever type of information they’re programmed to grab. In our case, they’re looking for juvenile offenders, anybody between the ages of six and eighteen who’s ever been picked up for anything from fighting at school to committing an actual crime. Within whatever radius we want to establish. Plus any kid who’s blogged or sent email with any kind of inflammatory language in it, whether it’s directed at an individual or a group or whatever.”
“Sounds ambitious,” DeMarco said. “And its purpose?”
“To compile a database. Of every juvenile in the county predisposed to become an adult offender.”
“Predisposed?” DeMarco said.
“Anything happens in a particular city or town, the program will tell us precisely who to pick up based on the nature of the crime. Think of the guesswork it will eliminate!”
“No more detective work.”
“Not only that but, and here’s the exciting part, we’ll be able to see them coming.”